Thank you!

Thanks to your advocacy efforts on our behalf, we're happy to report that the recently passed Omnibus Spending Bill includes a very small increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities! While our work is not over with regards to the upcoming 2018 budget to be passed in the fall, the Omnibus Spending Bill represents an endorsement of the important work that the humanities do for our communities. These funds will continue to support our work of providing free access to authoritative content about Virginia's history and culture.

William Faulkner (1897–1962)

William Faulkner was a Mississippi-born novelist, poet, and
screenwriter, winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in literature,
and twice a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (1955,
1963). Considered one of the most important American writers
of the twentieth century, he used primarily southern
settings in his work—many of his most famous novels,
including The Sound and the Fury
(1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930),
were set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi—and
examined complex social, psychological, and racial issues. A
modernist, he often composed his tragic, even Gothic stories
in a dense, stream-of-consciousness style that attempted to
emulate the ebb and flow of his characters' thoughts. His
characters, meanwhile, ranged from the descendants of slaves
to the richest of New South aristocrats, from the illiterate
and mentally ill to the Harvard educated. During the last
years of his life, Faulkner was a writer-in-residence and a
professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. MORE...

In This Entry

Explore Virginia

Share It

William Cuthbert Falkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New
Albany, Mississippi, to Murry Cuthbert Falkner, a railroad
worker, and Maud Butler, a housewife. William was raised in
Oxford, Mississippi, and, in 1915, left high school to work
as a bookkeeper. Longing for adventure, he joined the
Canadian Royal Air Force in 1918 by changing the spelling of
his name to the British-sounding Faulkner. Faulkner entered
the University of Mississippi in 1919 but withdrew in 1920.
He then held various jobs in New York and Mississippi until
1924.

Faulkner's first published novel, Soldier's Pay (1926), drew on his experiences in World War I
(1914–1918), while Mosquitoes (1927)
examined literary life in New Orleans (in 1925, Faulkner
lived there with the writer Sherwood Anderson).
Faulkner married Lida Estelle Oldham Franklin on June 20,
1929—she had divorced her husband to marry Faulkner and
brought two children of her own to the marriage—and they
later had two daughters, Alabama, who died nine days after
being born, and Jill.

Faulkner's critical and artistic ascendancy did not begin until the
publication of The Sound and the Fury
in 1929. Citing Faulkner's use of multiple narrators,
critics marveled at the text's loose-limbed experimentalism,
in which the author tells his story of the despairing,
declining Compson family four separate times but never from
the perspective of the character at the novel's center,
Caddy. This was Pablo Picasso's Cubism in the form of
novel-writing, only instead of Ernest Hemingway's virile
hunters or James Joyce's Dubliners, one gets the rotting,
rural underbelly of the New South. In As I
Lay Dying (1930), Faulkner presented the
journey of the Bundren family to bury their mother in
fifty-nine chapters—one consisting of only a single,
confusing sentence: "My mother is a fish"—and in fifteen
different voices.

In addition to his work as a novelist, Faulkner earned a living
during the 1930s and 1940s by writing movie screenplays
based on his own fiction as well as that of other writers,
including Hemingway's To Have and Have
Not (1937) and Raymond Chandler's detective story The Big Sleep (1939).
Faulkner's later work was not all commercially or even
critically successful, but he continued to be recognized,
winning the Nobel Prize, two Pulitzer Prizes (the second
posthumously), and, in 1955, the National Book Award.

Though he lived most of his life at his Rowan Oak house in Oxford,
Faulkner was writer-in-residence at the University of
Virginia from 1957 until 1958, a position he accepted in
part because his daughter and her family were living nearby.
Portions of his lectures at the university are recorded in
Faulkner in the
University (1959) and William Faulkner: Essays, Speeches and Public
Letters (1966). Faulkner bought a house in
Charlottesville in 1959 and finished a trilogy he had begun
with The Hamlet (1940), completing
The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). From 1961
until his death, Faulkner taught American Literature at the
University of Virginia. His last novel, The Reivers (1962), describes a boy's
transition into adulthood.

Faulkner died on July 6, 1962, of a heart attack in Byhalia,
Mississippi. He willed the major manuscripts and personal
papers in his possession to the Albert and Shirley Small
Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.
In addition, in 1998 and 2000, his daughter, Jill Faulkner
Summers, a resident of Charlottesville, donated two portions of his personal library to the
University of Virginia collection.

Country Lawyer and Other Stories for the
Screen (edited by Brodsky and Hamblin,
1987)

Stallion Road (screenplay, edited by
Brodsky and Hamblin, 1989).

Collections

Three Famous Short Novels (comprises
Spotted Horses, Old Man,
and The Bear, 1942)

The Portable Faulkner (edited by
Malcolm Cowley, 1946)

The Faulkner Reader (1954)

Snopes: A Trilogy (3 volumes,
comprises The Hamlet [revised
edition], The Town, and The Mansion, 1964)

Time Line

September 25, 1897
- William Cuthbert Falkner, known as William Faulkner, is born in New Albany, Mississippi, to Murry Cuthbert Falkner, a railroad worker, and Maud Butler, a housewife.

1915
- William Faulkner leaves high school to work as a bookkeeper.

1918
- William Falkner joins the Canadian Royal Air Force by changing the spelling of his name to the British-sounding Faulkner.

1919–1920
- William Faulkner is enrolled at the University of Mississippi.

1926
- William Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay, is published, drawing on his experiences in World War I (1914–1918).

1929
- William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury is published.

June 20, 1929
- William Faulkner marries Lida Estelle Oldham Franklin. She divorces her husband to marry Faulkner, bringing two children to her second marriage and bearing Faulkner two more daughters named Alabama, who died nine days after being born, and Jill.

1930
- William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying is published.

1949
- William Faulkner wins the Nobel Prize for literature.

1955
- In this year, William Faulkner is awarded the first of his two Pulitzer Prize awards for fiction and the National Book Award.

1957–1958
- William Faulkner is writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia.

1961–1962
- William Faulkner teaches, in the final year of his life, American literature at the University of Virginia.

1962
- William Faulkner's last novel, The Reivers, is published. It describes a boy's transition into adulthood.

July 6, 1962
- William Faulkner dies of a heart attack in Byhalia, Mississippi. He wills the major manuscripts and personal papers in his possession to the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

1963
- William Faulkner is awarded his second Pulitzer Prize in fiction.